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| The "Out of Body Experience" (OOBE) may be as natural for children as sleep and NDE for us. |
After a class on out-of-body experiences [like lucid dreaming], a psychology graduate student at the University of Ottawa came forward to researchers to say that she could have these voluntarily, usually before sleep. "She appeared surprised that not everyone could experience this," wrote the scientists in a study describing the case, published in February in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Pretty crazy, right? One would think that if you could leave your own body and float above it, you'd be a little more... vocal about it. But since it was a common experience for her -- one she "
began performing as a child when bored with 'sleep time' at preschool... moving above her body" instead of napping -- it may have appeared unremarkable. This is way more interesting than what I did, which was indeed napping.
The most exciting thing about this case, to me, is "the possibility that this phenomenon may have a significant incidence but [is] unreported because people do not think this is exceptional," as the authors wrote. "Alternatively," they continued, "the ability might be present in infancy but is lost without regular practice.
This would be reminiscent of the discovery and eventual study of synesthesia [confounding colors with sounds] that some researchers now hypothesized is more prevalent in young people or can be developed."
Those are fascinating suggestions -- both that these out-of-body experiences may be more common than previously thought, or could be learned during a critical window early in life.
But back to the case study. The 24-year-old "continued to perform this experience as she grew up assuming, as mentioned, that 'everyone could do it.'" This is how she described her out-of-body experiences: More
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